OPEC agrees to record cut in oil output: Saudi minister
ORAN: The OPEC oil cartel agreed on Wednesday to a record output cut of two million barrels a day, the Saudi Arabian oil minister said, with non-member producers also ready…
Court overturns decision to audit private newspapers
CAIRO: The administrative court overturned Tuesday a decision by the Central Auditing Agency (CAA) to monitor the financial and administrative records of privately owned newspapers.The head of the Cairo Administrative…
One On One: Credit Agricole looks forward to branching out in Egypt
CAIRO: Like many Egyptian banks, Credit Agricole Egypt (CAE) has plenty of cash on hand. But while a loan-to-deposit ratio of 40 percent - Egypt's national average is above 50…
BUSINESS BEAT: 'MasterCard can be very Islamic,' says exec
CAIRO: In Egypt, where the colloquial term for any credit card is "visa, it is easy to forget that a host of financial service companies are here, vying for a…
IN DEPTH: Visa sees 'huge potential' for Egypt market
CAIRO: When Tarek Elhousseiny took the helms at Egypt's Visa office in 2003, the company had already been working with banks for almost a decade to introduce electronic forms of…
Amateur hour at Rawabet
Waiting for the show to start at Rawabet Theater Sunday night, I struck up a conversation with two members of El-Kahwa, a fresh-faced group trying to break into Cairo's modern…
Obama, Bush find common ground on foreign policy
WASHINGTON, DC: Negotiating with our adversaries is a tricky business, and with President-elect Barack Obama on the way in, most observers of US foreign policy are confident that negotiating is…
Proving Huntington wrong
DOHA: What if the American essayist, Samuel Huntington, the father of the "clash of civilizations theory, had it wrong? The notion could fly in the face of the widening chasm…
The triumphant return of John Maynard Keynes
NEW YORK: We are all Keynesians now. Even the right in the United States has joined the Keynesian camp with unbridled enthusiasm and on a scale that at one time…
Decoding Egypt: Beyond Al-Nada Murder
CAIRO: The recent murder of two college girls at Al-Nada Compound, Sheikh Zayed City could be seen as an ordinary killing that only merits sorrow and sympathy, but, from a…